Unsurprisingly, Bryan Fischer is not happy that religious leaders won’t be addressing a ceremony marking the ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York. A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that they wanted to keep the focus “on the families of the thousands who died on Sept. 11,” and the Wall Street Journal noted that previous events marking the anniversary similarly did not include religious speakers and that there “will be an interfaith event recognizing first responders on Sept. 6.”
But Fischer believes that Bloomberg is up to something more sinister. By failing to include religious speakers, Fischer insists that Bloomberg is “playing favorites, and his favoritism is heavily stacked toward Muslims.”
According to Fischer, such public prayers should “be reserved for Christians and Jews,” (although he goes on to leave out the latter when he calls for prayer to be restricted to “the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.”) Fischer explains that the Founding Fathers would have wanted it that way because Muslims “pray to a different god.” Of course, as we pointed out on Friday, the AFA made clear that Christians and Jews “do not worship the same God” and that Christians should build friendships with their Jewish neighbors to convert them.
No word if Fischer had fault with the Prayer for America service that shortly followed the September 11 attacks, which included Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh prayers.
Multiculturalism has so infected Mayor Bloomberg’s view of America that if he allowed anybody to pray he would feel compelled to include a Muslim imam on the platform, praying a Muslim prayer and invoking the Muslim god at whose direction the 9/11 hijackers killed 3000 Americans in cold blood.
He knows the American people would never stand for that. But if he held the ceremony and allowed only Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis to pray, he’d get hammered by secular fundamentalists, muliticulturalists and Muslim advocates for playing favorites.
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As an aside, the mayor’s bloviation about the government not playing favorites when it comes to religion is just bilge. He’s clearly playing favorites, and his favoritism is heavily stacked toward Muslims. He is vigorously defending the building of the offensive Ground Zero mosque while his administration at the same time is doing everything in its power to keep the Orthodox church that was destroyed on 9/11 from being rebuilt.
But there is no cultural, historical or constitutional reason why clergy participation on 9/11 should not be reserved for Christians and Jews. This is for one simple reason: this nation was founded on the Judeo-Christian tradition and on faith in the God revealed in the Old and New Testaments. It has always been this God to whom Americans have turned in times of danger, and there is no reason why this God should not be the God to whom prayers are offered on 9/11.
Muslims, meanwhile, pray to a different god. Their god, they insist, has no son. The God of Christians, of course, does have a Son. Paul frequently opens his epistles by making it clear that the God to whom he prays is the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 1:3), to distinguish the God of the Scriptures, the true and living God, from all the Roman gods.
This God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is the God to whom the Founders prayed. It is this God who is the source of “the Laws of Nature” and is in fact “Nature’s God.” This God is the “Creator” who is the source of our “unalienable rights.” They even dated the Declaration of Independence from the year of Christ’s birth, and referred to him in so doing as “our Lord.”
So can public officials restrict public prayers to prayers directed to the God of the Founders? Absolutely. In fact, you can’t get any more American than praying to the same God to which they appealed as the “Supreme Judge of the World.”
